


Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself

by mogwai_do



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Panic Attack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-06
Updated: 2013-01-06
Packaged: 2017-11-23 22:32:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/627242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mogwai_do/pseuds/mogwai_do
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John knows he's broken, but sometimes his body just has to drive the point home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself

It was stupid, totally fucking stupid, but John couldn't stop his teeth from chattering.

It had been a quiet day, a dull one even in Sherlockian terms. Surgery, shopping, disinfecting the kettle after emptying it of whatever experiment Sherlock had used it for. As bored as Sherlock was, it hadn't yet reached the stage where John was prepared to ask him the best method of disposing of a flatmate. He'd watched some TV, blogged, gone to bed and ten minutes after he'd turned out the lights: this.

John clenched his fists beneath the covers, tried tensing and relaxing the muscle groups in his legs, anything to stop the trembling. Sometimes it worked; this was clearly not one of those times. He was wide awake and the flat was unusually silent; Sherlock had retreated to his room before John, though whether for sleep or further experiments John wasn't prepared to guess. Everything was still and dark and cold.

"Fuck," he hissed quietly between shaky breaths. He glanced at his nightstand, but he'd not refilled his water glass before coming up to bed and he knew he had nothing to eat in his room. He drew his legs up beneath the covers as the very idea of food made his stomach roll nauseatingly and he wrapped his arms around himself. He felt cold and if he really tried he could convince himself that was why he was shaking, but he'd never been very good at self-deception - psychosomatic limp notwithstanding.

He should get up, but he was tired; it had been a long day, but more than that, he didn't want Sherlock to see, to know that John was even more broken and useless than a ruined shoulder and a psychosomatic limp already made him. He didn't want to look too closely at the roiling black terror he knew lay just behind his conscious thoughts, but he could feel it there waiting to swallow him up if he relaxed for even a moment.

John twisted violently, as if he could physically turn his back on it, and started reciting the major muscle groups in his head as the shaking ran its course. A particularly violent tremor ripped through him and his mind jumped tracks, muscle groups to snippets of pop songs he'd heard on the way home, times tables, one to ten in any language he could remember. It was spiralling out of his control, he knew, and that made the fear trying to swallow him all the blacker.

He reached for his glass of water, hoping, despite knowing otherwise, that there might be a dribble of water left in it, something he could use to distract his body from its vicious circle, and then maybe he'd be able to get his brain back on track and get some much needed sleep. His shaking hand misjudged and he knocked the glass, glad it was empty now, sending it banging to the wooden floor, though fortunately not hard enough to break. The sound was loud in the quiet of the flat and for a moment John froze, caught between fear of discovery and fury at the ridiculousness of his body and mind's betrayal.

His heart was hammering as he waited out long seconds, but there was no sound from below. John took a shaky breath and then another; this was so stupid, so fucking stupid. He'd invaded fucking Afghanistan and now he was all but paralysed in terror of absolutely nothing at all.

He only wished logic worked, but he'd long since learned that the fear was as impervious to logic and common sense as it was to being told to 'calm down and relax'. Fucking idiots! As if that had ever helped, as if he hadn't the brains to try that himself; sometimes he entirely understood Sherlock's impatience and frustration with people.

The shaking was coming in waves now, slower but harder to control, like ocean swells. He wasn't sure if that was an improvement or not. It felt like the longest attack he'd had since he'd got out of the hospital, but it probably wasn't. It would have been easier to cope with if he even knew what had set it off, tiredness? Boredom? Something on the TV that he hadn't even been paying attention to? If he were afraid of gunmen, of bombs and criminal masterminds that would be one thing, but he wasn't. He might as well be frightened of the fucking dark.

He thought maybe, maybe, it was subsiding, but that brought with it a new terror: they usually came in clusters and now he'd be on edge waiting for the next one to happen, at the surgery, at a crime scene, even just in the kitchen, in front of his patients, colleagues or worst of all, Sherlock. Waiting and waiting, like the moments before an IED went off, or the call to surgery. 

John swore and clenched his fists in the sheets, determined not to give in to it again and yet knowing it was beyond his control. The sudden sound of Sherlock bounding up the stairs, two or three at a time was sheer relief for the distraction even with the sudden terror that Sherlock of all people would be able to look at him and just _know_. The door swung open without a knock, Sherlock never did, and his jacket was tossed onto the bed.

"Good, you're awake," Sherlock announced, despite the obviousness of the statement, "Come on."

John was moving before Sherlock had even finished speaking, not caring anymore if Sherlock had deduced him already or not: this was something to do. He could channel the adrenaline into movement, into dressing quickly, hunger overriding the nausea as he grabbed a handful of biscuits on the way out of the flat. And if Sherlock chose to walk briskly to the crime scene forcing John into a half run to keep up and coincidentally burning off so much restlessness. And if the crime scene turned out to be so simple that even John could solve it, then perhaps living with a genius flatmate wasn't such a bad thing after all.

FIN


End file.
